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“Dumlock” Makes Flashing w/ HTC Unlock Easier

If you’re one of the many unlucky people who’s had to resort to the HTC unlock method for rooting your phone, then you surely know the woes of being unable to flash kernels from recovery. Presently, we’ve had options such as FlashImageGUI or booting recovery from a PC, but that’s all about to change. Thanks to the geniuses over at Team Win (namely Dees_Troy, s0up, and Shift), your flashing experiences are about to get a lot easier.

The issue stems from the fact that if you boot into recovery normally, the phone won’t let you flash to the boot partition. Now, rather than horribly butcher the explanation for how this works, we’re just gonna let you hear the stuff straight from one of the developers of the method, Dees_Troy:

So, on a HTC device (and most Android devices) you have a boot partition for the kernel and a recovery partition for a recovery. The 2 partitions are more akin to dual booting operating systems on a laptop. The difference between recovery and boot is just that, the partition they are located in.You could flash a regular kernel to recovery and if you told your phone to boot recovery, it’d boot up normally using the kernel in recovery. And, vice versa, you can flash a recovery to boot, and if you let your phone boot up normally, it’d boot the recovery that’s in the boot partition.

I long suspected that something about the HTC unlock prevented you from flashing boot if you booted via recovery. But since tools like flash_image, and of course joeykrim’s FlashImageGUI, worked while booted normally; I figured that a recovery in boot would be able to function normally. So, what we’ve done is created a binary that dumps your recovery and your boot. Then we flash_image the recovery into boot and reboot. Once you reboot, you’re in a recovery that’s in the boot partition. To make everything work nicely, we added a few features to TWRP, but these features could be added to ANY recovery. Once in TWRP, the most important feature is one that lets you restore the boot that we backed up earlier. So you reboot to the recovery that’s in boot and with the tap of a few buttons, you restore your original boot.

It sounds extensive, but it’s really very simple. There’s a few little quirks to be aware of. First thing is I recommend that people make a backup of boot. Right now, it’s possible that you could run the tool twice and end up replacing your backup of boot with another copy of recovery, then when you get to TWRP (or whatever recovery you use) and restore your boot you’d just restore another copy of the recovery and be stuck in recovery. But at that point you could just flash a rom or restore the backup of boot that you hopefully made. The other thing is if you flash a bad kernel and can’t get it booted again, you’d be stuck until you get to a computer again.